Present technologies to create, manipulate, and process various signals involve a number of independent systems communicating with each other. An interface is a boundary across which the independent systems meet and act on or communicate with each other. A user interface includes a keyboard, a mouse, menus of a computer system. The user interface provides the communication between the user and the operating system of the computer. A software interface includes languages and codes written into the computer system that various applications use to communicate with each other and the hardware. A hardware interface includes wires, plugs, and sockets of hardware devices use to communicate with each other. A GUI is referred to a graphical user interface for the user to interact with the hardware and software to create, manipulate, or modify various signals using graphic icons and controls in addition to text. Typically, the GUI features the basic components, such as a pointer, a pointing device, icons, desktop, windows, and menus. The pointer usually appears on the display screen as an angled arrow, which the user moves to select objects or commands. The pointing device, such as a mouse or a trackball, enables the user to select objects on the display screen. The icons are small pictures that represent commands, files, or windows. By moving the pointer to the icon and pressing a mouse button, the user executes a command, converts the icon into the window, or moves the icon around the display screen. The desktop is the area on the display screen where icons are typically grouped. The user may divide the screen into different areas using the windows. In each window, the user may run a different program or display a different file. Most graphical user interfaces let the user to execute commands by selecting a choice from the menu.
With the increasing use of multimedia as part of the GUI, sound, voice, motion video, and virtual reality interfaces become a part of the GUI for many applications. For example, GarageBand (Trademark) produced by Apple Computer, Inc., uses sampled real musical instruments and synthesized instruments to create or edit a piece of music.
Current GUIs for musical notation, however, require complicated workflow, which involves numerous actions by the user, including many mouse clicks and travel, to perform a single operation. For example, to change a duration of a note on a musical staff, a user needs to actually replace the note with the note with a desired duration. To perform this, the user needs to open a menu located on the toolbar outside the staff area, select the note with the desired duration from the menu, bring the note having the desired duration to the staff area, and then replace the note on the staff with the note having the desired duration. For example, changing the duration of a pedal also involves many steps, including opening a menu with a palette, dragging a start sign for the pedal from the palette to a desired position in the notation window corresponding to the beginning of the pedal, then going back to the palette to pick up the end sign for the pedal, and dragging the end sign to the desired position on the notation window corresponding to the end of the pedal. Current graphical user interfaces (“GUIs”) for musical notation also do not provide a direct manipulation of many features of the note, including control of the position of the note as it moves along the staff, changing a time duration of a note, changing a velocity of the note, and the like.